Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Twilight Highlands, Heroic Grim Batol

So it seems that no one cares about spoilers, so I'll just not worry about them. I will tag posts with info about what will be spoiled.

This post contains minor spoilers about Twilight Highlands.

So I finished Twilight Highlands, which was an outstanding zone. Quite honestly, it redeemed the rest of the expansion for me. The Wildhammer questline was superb, as was the Maw of Madness line and the initial questline. Oh, and the dragon line. Actually, pretty much everything was awesome.

As well, I think that [The Worldbreaker] may quite possibly be the single finest quest in the game. The only word to describe that quest is elegance. That was immersion on so many levels. For me, it evoked the exact reaction in myself that it was intended to invoke in my character. Seriously, this was utterly brilliant, and would be extra-ordinarily hard to replicate in another medium.

With respect to Roger Ebert, WoW approached art right there.

Also, I did my first heroic dungeon today. I signed up for regular Grim Batol, which I hadn't done before, intending to do the dungeon quests. We did the first trash pack, and I thought that Grim Batol seemed a bit harder than the other instances. Then the tank said he was in Holy gear, so I figured that explained it. He changed to tanking gear, we keep going and it doesn't seem to get easier. Then someone says something, and I realize I accidentally signed up for Heroic Grim Batol!

It wasn't that bad. We wiped a bunch on the first and third bosses, but one-shot the second and fourth. Really, once you learn how to do the fights, they're pretty straightforward. Mana is a bit of an issue, but using a core of Holy Shock, Word of Glory and Holy Light, then sprinkling in Divine Light and Holy Radiance as necessary worked pretty well for me.

Tank gear is less important now than it was previously. It's still important, but a lot of the essential elements got moved into talents. Crit immunity, bonus health, bonus armor are talents now. Everyone has a lot of health compared to incoming hits. I myself have ~100k health in Holy gear.

The big thing tank gear has that holy does not is avoidance stats. But avoidance stats are more of a long-term effect. They reduce the damage the tank takes, but are really only effective over a longer period. In a short period, a tank can still take several hits in a row. But she still has enough health so that the healer can react and heal, maybe having to use several big heals.

So if the tank is in Holy gear, the mobs won't gib her instantly, but the healer will need to spend a lot of mana to keep her up. But that's doable in a short trash fight.

I just realized that I may have given the impression that the tank was in Holy gear for the entire run. That's not the case, he changed to tank gear after the second trash pack. All bosses were done with tank gear.